This is a really rotten movie. The other reviewer is being much too lenient. There aren't just loose ends in this movie, there are loose screws for which the concepts of completely unexplained flying Ugandans and days when all and I mean all fresh water suddenly freezes qualify (question: does it also happen when it's just been put in your stomach?) The presence of the otherwise excellent actors here is truly puzzling although Sean Penn is extraneous to the movie and does forget to put on a Polish accent. In sum, the plot is nonsensical, sort of like watching just one episode only of "Lost". For you who have not yet utterly wasted your time on this, Don't.
Reviews
3 Reviews
Funny Bones
(1995)
Mystical, strange, and brilliant movie
1 December 2003
Warning: Spoilers
"Funny Bones" is that rare movie that immerses the viewer completely in the lives of its protaganists whose convincing and compelling reality at times seems to offer a glimpse of universal truths.
(1 or 2 spoilers follow)
The ostensible main character is Tommy Fawkes, a young and very troubled comedian who has lived his whole life in the shadow of his famous comedic father, played by Jerry Lewis. I say ostensible because the movie is really an ensemble of brilliant performances. After bombing on a Las Vegas Stage in front of all his father's friends and admirers,Tommy disappears to Blackpool, which beckons him with flashbacks of the first 6 years of his life there. At approximately the same time, the movie shows a dramatic event taking place at sea on a vessel carrying strange contraband and where Jack Parker is shot at and dives into the sea, believing he is about to die. He surfaces along with a strange "egg", one of 6 comprising the contraband.
These story lines start to converge in Blackpool when an incognito Tommy, paying money to audition Blackpool's strange assorted comedic performers, encounters the Parker family, consisting of Jack Parker, a brilliant young but virtual savant idiot and suicidal comic genius, his mother, charmingly played by Leslie Caron of "Gigi" fame, and father and uncle. The story enfolds in bizarre splendor from there, revealing the familial relationship between the two groups and revealing a family secret that has impacted all of their lives.
But what is most engaging about the movie are the individual characters that seem almost transparent before the all-seeing camera of this film. Jack's father and uncle are two of the saddest and deeply moving characters of any film,the actors playing them rendering brilliant performances. The uncle has not spoken in 16 years. When noted at one point by a psychiatrist talking Jack down from the Blackpool tower, the father explains simply, "he's depressed". Such ironies as the deeply depressed comic pervade the film. Yet, the comic side is always imminent. In the next scene, the psychiatrist, in a scene almost reminiscent of Monty Python, is giving Jack a psychiatric test to determine his sanity, the questions of which are absurd and Jack's explanations of the answers zanily hilarious. Interwoven into all this is the mysterious nature of the contraband which is a very effective youth elixir and which is put to unwitting use in the course of the film; and the search by the smugglers, tied into the local police, for Jack and the missing "egg". Along with all of this, we are treated to intermittent bouts of amazing physical comedy as various old-time "acts" are performed. Actually, the various strands of the film are too rich to describe simply and must be seen to be experienced. Indeed, one of the most impressive things about the film is the jumping from one slice of life to another "a la John Sayles".
I will not, of course, describe the ending other than to say that it is satisfying and pulls most of the strands together. This movie will appeal to anyone who loves zany, somewhat eccentric, and highly talented, cinematic and well-scripted, movie-making.
(1 or 2 spoilers follow)
The ostensible main character is Tommy Fawkes, a young and very troubled comedian who has lived his whole life in the shadow of his famous comedic father, played by Jerry Lewis. I say ostensible because the movie is really an ensemble of brilliant performances. After bombing on a Las Vegas Stage in front of all his father's friends and admirers,Tommy disappears to Blackpool, which beckons him with flashbacks of the first 6 years of his life there. At approximately the same time, the movie shows a dramatic event taking place at sea on a vessel carrying strange contraband and where Jack Parker is shot at and dives into the sea, believing he is about to die. He surfaces along with a strange "egg", one of 6 comprising the contraband.
These story lines start to converge in Blackpool when an incognito Tommy, paying money to audition Blackpool's strange assorted comedic performers, encounters the Parker family, consisting of Jack Parker, a brilliant young but virtual savant idiot and suicidal comic genius, his mother, charmingly played by Leslie Caron of "Gigi" fame, and father and uncle. The story enfolds in bizarre splendor from there, revealing the familial relationship between the two groups and revealing a family secret that has impacted all of their lives.
But what is most engaging about the movie are the individual characters that seem almost transparent before the all-seeing camera of this film. Jack's father and uncle are two of the saddest and deeply moving characters of any film,the actors playing them rendering brilliant performances. The uncle has not spoken in 16 years. When noted at one point by a psychiatrist talking Jack down from the Blackpool tower, the father explains simply, "he's depressed". Such ironies as the deeply depressed comic pervade the film. Yet, the comic side is always imminent. In the next scene, the psychiatrist, in a scene almost reminiscent of Monty Python, is giving Jack a psychiatric test to determine his sanity, the questions of which are absurd and Jack's explanations of the answers zanily hilarious. Interwoven into all this is the mysterious nature of the contraband which is a very effective youth elixir and which is put to unwitting use in the course of the film; and the search by the smugglers, tied into the local police, for Jack and the missing "egg". Along with all of this, we are treated to intermittent bouts of amazing physical comedy as various old-time "acts" are performed. Actually, the various strands of the film are too rich to describe simply and must be seen to be experienced. Indeed, one of the most impressive things about the film is the jumping from one slice of life to another "a la John Sayles".
I will not, of course, describe the ending other than to say that it is satisfying and pulls most of the strands together. This movie will appeal to anyone who loves zany, somewhat eccentric, and highly talented, cinematic and well-scripted, movie-making.
Very Bad Things
(1998)
A very funny movie
26 August 2001
As can be seen from the critics and user comments, this is one of those unusual movies about which people are irreconcilably divided. It is a very black satire about a group of yuppies who throw a bachelor party in Las Vegas for one of the group about to get married. A prostitute invited to the party is accidently killed in flagrante delicto and this group without a moral compass of their own follows the lead of one amoral member. The group then descends into a nightmare from which there is no escape as the original decision leads according to its own implacable logic to more and more heinous deeds.
The humour of the movie is extremely black and absurdist and rather difficult to describe. But the amazing feat of the director and actors is they pull it all off. As the characters become increasingly more crazed and hysterical, you feel the relief of being outside the nightmare they are experiencing. From this vantage point the completely offbeat and irreverent events resulting from a bachelor party gone horribly wrong, escalating constantly into scenes and situations at which you can only marvel, in the hands of this writer and director, are actually hilarious, if you can maintain your perspective that this is satire and not reality.
The humour of the movie is extremely black and absurdist and rather difficult to describe. But the amazing feat of the director and actors is they pull it all off. As the characters become increasingly more crazed and hysterical, you feel the relief of being outside the nightmare they are experiencing. From this vantage point the completely offbeat and irreverent events resulting from a bachelor party gone horribly wrong, escalating constantly into scenes and situations at which you can only marvel, in the hands of this writer and director, are actually hilarious, if you can maintain your perspective that this is satire and not reality.
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